A quick glance through any photography or fashion magazine, or at the photos on social websites like Flickr, confirms that black and white photography is as popular as ever. With the coming of digital though, one important thing has changed. In the days of film photography, you shot on black and white film. Now, with digital cameras, you take photos in colour and then convert them to black and white.

In this article we run through the most commonly used black and white conversion methods, outlining the pros and cons of each. Instructions are provided for Photoshop CS and if the technique’s available, Photoshop Elements.

Converting to black and white digitally has a number of advantages. With film, the black and white conversion essentially happened at the time of shooting. If you wanted to change the nature of the black and white conversion, you could only do it by placing a coloured filter on the lens (a red filter, for instance, makes blue skies much darker).

Now, by starting with a colour photo and converting it to black and white in Photoshop, you have complete control over the conversion. Darkening a blue sky is easy, once you know how, and you can decide exactly how dark you want it to be.

The best cameras for black and white photography are digital SLRs. For the best possible conversion, start by shooting in RAW. Then, in your RAW conversion software, output the photo as a 16 bit Tiff file. 16 bit files have a lot more information to work with than 8 bit files, which makes for a better conversion with smoother tonal graduations.

Most digital SLRs (and some compacts) have a black and white mode. The camera is making the conversion for you, and the results are usually poor, giving flat, washed out photos. Avoid this mode, and use the following techniques instead.

Chick below to see the how to make it happen:
http://photo.tutsplus.com/tutorials/post-processing/7-black-and-white-photoshop-conversion-techniques/